Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by Gibbins, David

  ‘I think you’ve just been had,’ Jack said, turning to Costas. ‘No more jokes about his shorts, maybe?’

  ‘No way,’ Costas said, suddenly determined, giving Hiebermeyer a steely look. ‘From now on, it gets serious.’

  Jack grinned, and then his phone rang. He answered it quickly. ‘That was Ibrahim. He’s got the equipment stowed in the Toyota ready to drive to the river’s edge. Time to saddle up.’

  ‘What do you mean, saddle up?’

  ‘I thought we’d take a camel ride to get there. Immerse ourselves in desert culture before we immerse ourselves in the Nile. The full Sudan experience.’

  Costas stared at the camel, which had ambled over to the plateau and was gazing at him dolefully. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘That thing’s got it in for me.’

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Aysha said. ‘If you mount it while it’s lying down, you won’t have to go anywhere near its orifices.’

  Costas looked at the camel, than back at the river. ‘Camel, crocodile. Camel, crocodile. Camel. Crocodile.’

  Hiebermeyer thrust a picture he had been carrying of a Nile crocodile in front of Costas. ‘Snap,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean, snap?’

  ‘I mean snap, the card game. If you don’t get on the camel now, I’ll put another picture on this one and then when you get in the water, snap.’

  ‘Snap,’ Costas repeated feebly. ‘Okay. I get it. Crocodiles. A really bad joke. You can make up for it by helping me get up on this camel. Where’s yours, Jack?’

  Jack pretended to look shocked. ‘Oh, I’m not getting on a camel. No fear. I’ll be walking far ahead, at the end of a very long lead.’ He took a deep breath and turned to the others. ‘Good luck with the inspection, Aysha. I thought I’d been pretty well everywhere, but I’ve never dived in the Nile. I’m itching to get in.’

  He turned and peered again at the plateau beside the river where the temple lay concealed. Only a few hours earlier, he had been flying over the Abu Simbel temple beside Lake Nasser, imagining diving into the submerged chambers in the cliff face where the statues of Ramses the Great had once stood. That would have been a remarkable dive, for the haunting atmosphere rather than the possibility of new discoveries; before the Aswam dam, the inner chambers at Abu Simbel had been above the level of the Nile and had been scoured by treasure-hunters and archaeologists for generations. Here, though, it was different. The temple at Semna had never been explored, and may have been sealed up for millennia. They might be like Carter and Carnarvon in the tomb of Tutankhamun, entering a space that had been undisturbed since the time of the pharaohs, except underwater and with dangers that made the curse of the tomb seem lame. But they had dived on the very edge of possibility before – into an iceberg, down mine shafts, above a live volcano – and Jack would confront the risks here as he had done then, with Costas to keep him from straying too far into the unknown. He felt the adrenalin pumping already. This could be the dive of a lifetime. If they could get inside.

  He looked at Costas. ‘You good to go?’

  Costas picked up the camel’s lead and handed it to him, a doleful expression on his face. ‘All I ever wanted to do was build submersibles. And here I am about to ride a camel across the desert in the Sudan, and then get eaten by crocodiles. And don’t say it,’ he said, glancing at Hiebermeyer. He shook his head again, and then turned to Jack, cracking a smile. ‘But you know I’ll follow you anywhere, Jack. Even on a camel. And in answer to your question, yes.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m good to go.’

  12

  Jack slipped into the water at the edge of the river and felt the wonderful sense of relief he always experienced at the beginning of a dive, when the weight of his equipment disappeared and all he could think about was the excitement ahead. The submersible two days before had been a different kind of thrill, but only because the extraordinary allure of their prize had allowed him to overcome his dislike of confinement in small spaces and his yearning for the freedom he was about to experience now. He had been looking forward to diving again since he had last donned equipment more than a month ago at the IMU training facility in England, and the fact that this was his first ever dive in the Nile meant that the adrenalin was pumping at an even higher rate than usual. He looked at Costas, who was floating beside him with his visor already shut and his headlamp on. They were wearing all-environment e-suits, Kevlar-reinforced drysuits with fully integrated buoyancy and breathing systems controlled by computers built into the back of their helmets. The contoured backpacks contained three high-pressure cylinders filled with gas tailored for each dive, in this case air for the main part of the dive, a helium–oxygen mix for the deeper part and pure oxygen for decompression during their ascent, all of it attuned to a dive with a predicted depth of over sixty metres and a duration of at least an hour. They had no safety backup, but the equipment had been tried and tested in extreme conditions, and they both knew they could rely on each other’s skill-set and the mutual trust they had built up over the years.

  Jack snapped his visor shut and activated the intercom. ‘Good to go?’ He could hear Costas’ heavy breathing as he struggled with something underwater. He slipped under the surface, and saw that Costas was attempting to adjust the weight of a large object on his waist belt. The increasingly frayed boiler suit which he had worn for years as an outer layer had finally given up the ghost during their dive the year before into the volcano at the site of Atlantis, and the new one still looked startlingly white, in need of a really dirty dive into a hole in the ground to give it credibility. Costas had transferred all his tools and gadgets from the remains of the old suit to the new one, and had added a second belt to take more. He heaved it round, then gave the divers’ okay signal.

  ‘Good to go.’

  They dropped a metre or so below the surface, and then turned in the direction of the channel. Jack checked the computer readout inside his visor, showing depth, available gas supply and suit temperature, and then looked around him. The water was clear but with a peculiar darkness to it, and he could not see the bottom. They had chosen to enter at a point some fifty metres upriver from the submerged rocks of the great gate of Semna, and to use the current that flowed through the narrow defile to take them into the pool below and then up to the location of the submerged channel that seemed to lead into the underground chamber. They knew that the flow near the riverbed was strong, and they were prepared for a rocky ride and the risk that the current might sweep them beyond their target; but there were no good entry points closer to the chamber, and this route was the better option.

  A few minutes later they had descended to twenty metres and Jack could see the two massive rocks of the great gates below him, their surface worn smooth by millennia of flood waters, and between them the defile some twenty metres wide that had once channelled the entire flow of the Nile into the pool below. Costas swam vigorously ahead to position himself over the channel, and Jack followed, letting himself sink slowly into it. ‘Ready for a ride,’ Costas said. Jack looked down into the blurry flow of fast water and realised that he was being sucked in, and that his only choice was to go with it. Costas was suddenly drawn away from him at horrifying speed, spinning round as the current took him forward and down towards the rocky base of the channel. As Jack felt the water grip him, he instinctively resisted, and for a few moments felt a searing pain in his torso as the current dragged his body away from the calmer waters above. Then he relaxed, letting the current pull him under, sucking him along. He was at the mercy of the water, unable to control his movements, and could do nothing but watch as he came terrifyingly close to the rocky outcrops that loomed out of the side of the channel and disappeared as quickly behind him. The depth readout inside his visor plummeted from thirty to fifty metres in a matter of seconds, and he braced himself for the impact with calmer water beyond the channel that he knew would be like hitting
the surface after jumping off a high board. He caught sight of Costas some ten metres in front of him, his headlamp beam spinning around crazily, and he sensed a darkness ahead in the deep water of the pool at the end of the channel. He checked his depth gauge again: almost sixty metres. The floor of rock below him was pocked with potholes but worn smooth by the water, devoid of visible life. It was as if they were being sucked into another world, the Protean darkness from which the Egyptians believed all creation sprang; the channel was like the passage through which escape could never be possible, dooming all who allowed themselves to be taken by it to an eternity of swirling round the pit of the underworld.

  Suddenly he felt the wind knocked out of him, as hard as if he had been hit in a rugby tackle, and he heard Costas gasp as well. They had been thrown clear of the channel, and he sensed the flow of the water decrease and his fins begin to find purchase as he kicked himself upright. He saw nothing but darkness, and switched on his headlamp. The beam reflected off particles suspended in the water, dazzling him, and he switched it off again. The glowing red readout of his depth gauge showed seventy-two metres, well below the level of the channel. He felt himself sinking further, and injected a quick blast of air into his buoyancy compensator to stop his descent. His limbs felt heavier as he moved them, as if they were pushing against some resistance, and he realised why. He had sunk into the silt on the floor of the pool, an accumulation that had been suspended here since time immemorial, swirling and settling beneath the channel, its bottom somewhere in the ooze far below him.

  Costas’ voice came over the intercom. ‘Jack. You there?’

  ‘Roger that,’ Jack replied. ‘I’m here, though I don’t know where that is.’

  ‘Try rising to sixty metres.’

  Jack kicked, but his foot jammed into something. He reached down with his right hand and felt a smooth shape with undulations, perhaps an eroded rock that had broken free from the channel and come to rest in the pool. He must be closer to the bottom than he had thought. He pulled his foot again, but it was stuck. He reached down with his left hand and felt the other side. It was big, at least a metre wide. He put his hand into a hole on one side, feeling a hollow space within, and then found a similar hole on the other side. He realised that the object was symmetrical, with the same shapes on both sides. He moved his hands forward where the rock narrowed towards his trapped leg, and then reached further down, feeling sharp protuberances through his gloves. He tugged at his foot again, and then heaved. ‘Shit,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘What is it?’ Costas said.

  ‘I’ve been bitten.’

  ‘What? I haven’t seen anything living down here.’

  ‘You won’t believe it, but it’s a crocodile.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s not alive. It’s a giant crocodile skull, wedged into the rocks at the bottom of the pool. But I can’t get it to release me. My fin’s caught in its teeth.’

  ‘Don’t pull on it. I’ve been reading about these things. That only makes it clamp down harder. Try lifting the top jaw up.’

  Jack reached down, found a place between the teeth to slot his fingers, and pulled with both hands. It came away surprisingly easily, and he kicked his trapped fin until it was free. He dropped the jaw, letting it fall slowly back into the silt, and then swam upwards, rising until he could just make out the glow from Costas’ headlamp beam and then his shadowy form a few metres away. He blasted air into his suit until he could see Costas clearly, his upper body poking out of the sediment into the clearer water above, and beyond that the turbulence of the current. ‘Thanks for the tip,’ he said. ‘I thought I was about to lose my foot.’

  ‘It gives me the jitters just thinking of that thing down there,’ Costas said. ‘You sure it was dead?’

  ‘Long dead. Pretty well fossilised. Probably even a dinosaur. It was big enough, huge.’

  ‘You sure? Everything looks bigger underwater. You know, refraction of light through your mask. Add a bit of adrenalin, a bit of nitrogen narcosis …’

  Jack measured the breadth with his hands. ‘I didn’t see it. But it was this wide.’

  ‘Okay. That’s enough for me. The sooner we’re out of this primeval soup, the better.’ Costas pointed away behind them. ‘My terrain mapper’s showing the entrance to that rock-cut channel about forty metres away at bearing two hundred and seventy-three degrees, depth twenty-five metres. The underwater river created by the current seems to flow around the lower side of the pool, but we might be able to avoid it by swimming beneath and rising up the other side, close to the edge of the pool. You good with that?’

  ‘Sounds like a plan. You lead.’

  Jack followed Costas as he rose slightly and swam over the sediment in an easterly direction. He dropped down again to avoid the swirling waters of the channel, his form skirting the billowing mass of sediment like an aircraft flying in and out of cloud. He stopped suddenly, raised his hand, and pointed at a jagged mass rising out of the silt. ‘Check this out,’ he said. ‘It’s machinery from a river steamer.’

  Jack swam up beside him, close now to the rocky edge of the pool. Wedged into the mass of metal was a large upturned vessel like a rowing boat. ‘Amazing,’ he exclaimed. ‘The dimensions look bang-on. I’m guessing this is one of the whaleboats from the 1884 expedition.’ He stared for a moment at the wooden hull, as well preserved in the fresh water as if it had been sunk that day. He remembered the sangar with the evidence of the British soldiers, and for a moment it felt as if he would rise from the waters into the bustle of activity of those few days in 1884 when the expedition had passed overhead. He turned from the wreckage and looked at Costas. ‘Fantastic. This really brings history alive for me.’

  ‘How’s your air supply?’

  Jack had been monitoring his gauges since dropping beyond their expected depth threshold in the pool. ‘More depleted than I’d like. I think I was breathing a lot trying to right myself in that channel.’

  ‘Me too. Let’s get going. At least from now on it’ll be shallower.’

  They swam past the wreckage and up the rocky wall, its sides smoothed by the current but here and there covered with patches of green algae-like growth, the first signs of aquatic life Jack had seen since entering the water. A few minutes later they topped twenty-five metres depth and swam over the original surface of the riverbank beside the pool, as it had been at low water before the Aswan dam was constructed. They followed the drop-off until they came to the feature they had seen in the sonar profile readout that Ibrahim had provided; it was a rock-cut channel leading away from the submerged riverbank towards the cliff base and the underground chamber they knew lay some thirty metres to the east, still invisible in the murky gloom. Jack sank down into the channel, stretching his arms out to either side and dropping to the floor. ‘Just wide enough for a crocodile,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t,’ Costas said. ‘We’ve tempted fate enough as it is.’

  ‘The channel and the cliff face must have been buried in sand before the Aswan dam, explaining why none of the earlier archaeologists saw this,’ Jack said. ‘Everything must have been swept clean when the river rose and flooded through. It shows how much more you can see underwater. I really need to get Maurice diving.’

  ‘You’ve been saying that for years. You’ll never change him. And I dread to think where those shorts would end up if he dived in with them on.’

  Jack swam up the channel, and moments later they were at the base of the cliff. The channel disappeared inside, a black cavity just large enough to fit his frame; its floor was carpeted with sand where it had evidently remained since the inundation, kept by the rock walls of the channel from being swept away. Jack sank down to the rocky floor, peering ahead through his headlamp beam as far as he could see. He noticed the sand slope upwards in a deeper accumulation until it seemed to fill the aperture some five metres ahea
d. He checked his pressure gauge. ‘I’ve got about twenty minutes left at this depth. We may not be able to get past that obstruction. But I’m going to try.’

  ‘I’m on your tail,’ Costas said. ‘Go for it.’

  Jack swam forward using a gentle dolphin stroke with his fins, his arms by his sides. After five metres he came up against a bank of sand, and put his hands into it. The sand was coarse grained, easy to dig into, but there seemed little way of making progress. ‘I think we must be within a few metres of the chamber, but this could be as far as we go,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t give up so soon,’ Costas said. ‘Make way for Walter, and see what he can do.’

  ‘Walter?’

  ‘My very latest gadget. A miniature water pump. He sucks away sand and deposits it down an exhaust tube into the current. When I heard we were going to the Nile, I thought “sand”, and decided this would be a good dive to trial him.’

  Jack heard a whirring and raised himself to let a little vehicle about the size of a small dog drive under him and bury itself in the sand, sucking it away and disgorging it out of a plastic tube somewhere behind. In a few moments it had burrowed deeper and disappeared. Jack followed, pulling himself through a hole in the sand just big enough for him to squeeze his way along. After about three metres the sand fell away to open water in front of him, and he saw Walter pause, leap out and then bury himself in the sediment again a few metres to the right, like a rodent digging a hole. Jack wriggled out of the sand and then turned to see Costas do the same, his head emerging beside Walter’s exhaust pipe. Costas quickly pulled himself along it and dived into the sediment after Walter until only his fins were sticking out. A moment later the whirring noise stopped and he re-emerged, holding the pump by the tube like a dog on a lead. ‘He’s got a mind of his own,’ he gasped, looking up. ‘So where are we?’

  Jack increased the intensity of his headlamp and panned it around. They were inside a large rectilinear chamber at least ten metres high and fifteen metres across. The sand which had partly filled the channel formed a large sloping bank against the side of the chamber facing the cliff, evidently where it had fallen in from the sandbank outside before that had been swept away by the rising waters of the Nile. He watched as Costas swam slowly up to a dark form at the rear of the chamber, his beam playing on its surface, and then come to an abrupt stop where the form protruded at the top. There was a gasp, and a sound like a whimper, and then Costas spoke in a whisper. ‘Holy cow.’